How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

michaelkpate · 2011-02-18 16:18:49

hcgtv wrote:

I truly believe if Textpattern had more templates to choose from, converted over from freely available XHTML designs or ported over from competing products (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!), then more people would be inclined to try out Textpattern.

I think the Textpattern community as a whole has always underestimated the laziness of the average person starting their own website. Although we have talked about it. In the meantime, I think you and Stuart had a great conversation about packaging designs. I think that gives us a starting point at least.

maverick wrote:

The fact that Txp is around, still changing, with a solid community, after all these years, challenges, and changes. That’s actually impressive, imo.

hcgtv wrote:

PHP-Nuke is still around also. ;)

Yeah, but Textpattern has documentation and people who will actually answer questions. I shudder to think how few of the 278,145 projects available on Sourceforge can say that.

hcgtv wrote:

So I guess it’s up to us to write code for our own needs, at least those that can code PHP, and forget about trying to effect change.

Just out of curiosity, and I apologize if this is available elsewhere, but what is/are your top issue/issues?

hcgtv · 2011-02-19 15:53:02

michaelkpate wrote:

I think the Textpattern community as a whole has always underestimated the laziness of the average person starting their own website. Although we have talked about it.

I’m taking Zem’s advice in that thread, “It’ll be ready when someone writes it. Simple as that.” Funny, I recall Zem showing us a screenshot of a template manager in the works, but it never saw the light, nor was the code introduced into the repository.

Just out of curiosity, and I apologize if this is available elsewhere, but what is/are your top issue/issues?

On 9/26/2010, I wrote an email to the mailing list entitled The Blogging Software Dilemma. That email drew 28 responses, more traffic to the mailing list than all of 2010 combined. The thread hit a nerve, with many people offering their time and custom mods to the core if Textpattern was on a source repository that was more conducive to outside developers.

For 5 years, all I’ve heard from the core devs is we code what we want or need, the reason for no roadmap, and there’s no money in Textpattern. Yet, there’s many of us outside the inner circle who would like to contribute to this project and are not interested if VC money is involved.

So I would say my biggest issue is the lack of leadership, vision and cojones.

Bloke · 2011-02-19 16:50:58

hcgtv wrote:

people offering their time and custom mods to the core if Textpattern was on a source repository that was more conducive to outside developers.

And TXP 5 is. ~~Bitbucket.org is the Mercurial tool for people to clone the master repo and publish their changes for us to merge in~~ EDIT: A better way is to clone the repo server-side on Google Code, make a local clone of that, work on it, push your changes to your server-side clone and then raise a pull request via a ticket. We’ll pull those changes to the core.

I’m out of the loop at the moment due to other (short-term) client commitments so Sam and Jeff are going to carry the torch for a few weeks. I’m sure you’ll hear more.

For 5 years, all I’ve heard from the core devs is we code what we want or need, the reason for no roadmap, and there’s no money in Textpattern.

I didn’t realise I’d whinged that much :-) Perhaps I’ll back off with the posts then, if that’s the impression I’m giving: maybe I should keep quiet so it can’t come back to haunt me in future?

On roadmaps:

If we post a roadmap and don’t stick to it due to illness or something then we’re lambasted for not meeting targets.
If we don’t post a roadmap we’re lambasted for having no vision.
If we post a roadmap and it doesn’t list the things people want the core to do (everyone has their own pet things the core should do, from automatic excerpting or contact forms, to a phpMyAdmin style tool for TXP database management) then we get lambasted for not listening.
That only leaves “post a roadmap and stick to it” which, when the above is taken into account, is something I certainly can’t guarantee, nor is it something I particularly desire to publish given the negative feedback it’ll attract. Might happen when we know more about what we can achieve under Spark/Plug and the impact it’s going to have on the current community, e.g. plugins compatibility.

For the record though, in case I’ve ever implied otherwise:

I’m trying to help build a light and breezy platform that enables others to build on it, without bloating the core with stuff that only 20% of users require. I can’t speak for what’s gone in before (comments, bleurgh) nor can I guarantee that the core will exactly meet your requirements, but I’m trying to help it meet most basic requirements. Templates is the stickiest part imo because of the way TXP was designed and is probably the reason it’s never been tackled in the core. But look at Escher, based on the same Framework as TXP 5 is adopting. It has one-click switchable themes out of the gate. It has a bunch of other markup helpers (markdown, Smarty, Textile, ..) and page cacheing built in. The list goes on. While I can’t say all this is going to be in v5.0.0 I can say that adopting the framework will allow us or plugin authors to do stuff that we simply cannot do now in 4.x, and a lot faster in future.
if it was about the money I’d have moved on a long time ago.

So I would say my biggest issue is the lack of leadership, vision and cojones.

Leadership: fine in principle. Find me some people in the community willing to give up their day job to the cause.
Vision: code is less than half the battle. Marketing is a large chunk of the rest. I opened up a challenge to write a post / tweet / article to say something positive about TXP in the wider world. In two weeks we’ve had one entry (it is very good!). Regardless if the iPod is a draw or not, if the community isn’t willing to help itself then we can code all day and make the best product in the world, it won’t make people flock to us without some marketing effort; and word of mouth is the best marketing one can get. Just look at Facebook where friends sell commercial products to other friends via the ‘Like’ button (and fwiw, I’ve already started the ball rolling after FB’s recent development announcements with an app on our own Facebook page to increase our presence there)
Cojones: the path of least resistance was for us to stick with the current code base. Rewriting it — and taking a shedload of heat in the process for that decision — seems pretty courageous. It’s not a decision we took lightly.

Last edited by Bloke (2011-02-20 20:42:28)

michaelkpate · 2011-02-19 22:55:33

hcgtv wrote:

On 9/26/2010, I wrote an email to the mailing list entitled The Blogging Software Dilemma. That email drew 28 responses, more traffic to the mailing list than all of 2010 combined. The thread hit a nerve, with many people offering their time and custom mods to the core if Textpattern was on a source repository that was more conducive to outside developers.

Sorry I missed it. I just dug through my gmail to find it and read the entire thing. So picking through here, people are looking for:

1) Better handling of themes/templates

2) Localized Textile

3) Visual Semantic Editor

4) Decent management and insertion of media into article

5) Item management (aka I don’t want to have to remember by heart the URL of each and everyone of my thousands article or rewrite it all by hand when I change URL scheme)

6) UI “UI is tired and oldskool and difficult to navigate”

7) Revision system

8) Humane update

9) Comment system is rudimentary

10) Plugins are hard to find, and hard to assess the quality of

11) No integration with external services or sites.

12) Templates are stored in the database

So, doing a bit of editing, I think it can be reduced down to 5. I left out 2 because to me that is kind of a separate issue. 11 is much the same way – the lack of 3rd party support stems from the size of the userbase.

1) A Revised UI

2) A Themes Engine and External Template Support

3) Post Editor which includes Media Management

4) Automated Updates including identifying plugin support

5) Improved Plugin Directory

—-

My personal take:

1) I actually run the stock UI. I have looked through all the plugins and haven’t found one that really appealed to me. But I always thought the WordPress backend was pretty ugly until 3.0. It made a lot of strides in the last year

2) No one can question the fact that WordPress has been very successful in developing a community of themes developers in a way unmatched by another cms. This is certainly something that would help. Whether they are external files or stored in the database I think is pretty irrelevant as long as there is some way to edit them. And personally, I would rather edit a well-written Textpattern theme than many of the WordPress themes I have looked at.

3) Something else that WordPress didn’t do very well for a long time but the media management stuff there is pretty good now.

4) One-Click Updates is nice. I am surprised that one mentioned creating the config.php. Having WordPress create the wp-config.php automatically is certainly a plug for them.

5) Not being able to find the plugin you are looking for is very disheartening or finding it is incompatible with your versions of the cms happens no matter which one you choose. But I do think the directory could use some improvement. Although this is almost a separate issue.

As far as googlecode vs github vs bitbucket, I used to dutifuly checkout the old svn version in the old days. I haven’t really tried the new stuff except github, for which the default windows client is pretty much unusable. But I need to spend more time exploring before I really comment on that.

And I guess I need to spend some time with Escher, too.

hcgtv · 2011-02-20 14:23:13

Bloke wrote:

I didn’t realise I’d whinged that much :-) Perhaps I’ll back off with the posts then, if that’s the impression I’m giving: maybe I should keep quiet so it can’t come back to haunt me in future?

Stef, to tell you the truth, I think you’re doing your best. Look at the size of your post, the time you take to explain things, this hasn’t happened in the past here. Whatever steam we blow off, it’s because of what has transpired over the years. There were many people willing to give of their time that are gone now, it’s a long list, the momentum we had 5 years ago is a distant memory. No matter what the future holds with TXP5, you’ve got to admit that some long time community members, that still take the time to post on the forum, are skeptical. So besides a new code base, a rebuilding of the community is in order, or else who’s going to go out and trumpet your hard work.

Leadership: fine in principle. Find me some people in the community willing to give up their day job to the cause.

Just ask.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#13 2011-02-18 16:18:49

Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

#14 2011-02-19 15:53:02

Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

#15 2011-02-19 16:50:58

Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

#16 2011-02-19 22:55:33

Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

#17 2011-02-20 14:23:13

Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)

Board footer